Marcelo Sabates

Qualia and Mental Causation in a Physical World: Themes From the Philosophy of Jaegwon Kim

1. Reality and reduction: whats really at stake in the causal exclusion debate Louise Antony 2. Two property theories and the causal conundrum for physicalism Frank Jackson 3. Mental causation: the free lunch Barry Loewer 4. Does mental causation require psychophysical identities? Brian McLaughlin 5. The Canberra plan neglects ground Ned Block 6. Microrealization and the mental Sydney Shoemaker 7. Supervenience and the causal explanation of behavior Fred Dretske 8. Visual awareness and visual qualia Christopher Hill 9. Phenomenal externalism, Lolita, and the planet Xenon Michael Tye 10. Troubles for radical transparency James Van Cleve 11. How theories work: open questions for methodological philosophy of science Lawrence Sklar.

Quantum java: The upwards percolation of quantum indeterminacy

Despite a general, if often provisional, acceptance of quantum indeterminacy, and a now orthodox physicalism on which macroscopic states are held to depend in some sense on microscopic states, many philosophers of mind and of science continue to work under the assumption that macro states, such as brain states, evolve deterministically from prior macro states. Frequently this presumption is implicit and undefended, or explicit but given minimal defense. 1 In neither case is the tension between quantum indeterminacy, macro-micro dependence and macro determinism given full recognition. Sometimes the tension is recognized, but it is held that there is at least a legitimate hope that quantum indeterminism need not percolate up to the macro level. 2 Finally, some philosophers of mind address the issue and defend the view that, for one reason or another, quantum indeterminacy not only need not, but in fact does not, percolate to the macro level. 3 In this paper we demonstrate that micro indeterminism leads to macro indeterminism unless macro states are effectively independent from micro states. We show this is so whether the relationship between realizing and realized states is, in orthodox fashion, deterministic, or, in unorthodox fashion, indeterministic. The price of macroscopic determinism is that one must give up the dependence of the macro on the micro, a dependence upon which physicalism rests. A puzzle about the very idea of macroscopic determinism must be addressed at the outset. Macro determinism is an example of what is sometimes called partial determinism (Earman, 1986). We call a system partially deterministic with respect to a class of its properties just in case the state of the system at any particular time with regard

The Explanatory Relevance of Psychological Properties

Worries about the causal efficacy of psychological properties are legion in recent philosophy of mind. Some of the sources of these worries are Davidson’s anomalism, content externalism, the irreducibility of consciousness, causal-explanatory exclusion, and the structurally-based feature of functional properties. A good number of answers to these (epi)phenomenal challenges end up accepting either strongly reductive or strongly anti-naturalist positions.1 Some of us, somewhat reluctantly, started to explore epiphenomenalism as a potential conclusion of some of these challenges.2 In this paper I will not discuss the sources of epiphenomenalist worries. My aim here is to explore whether epiphenomenalism, and in particular the kind of epiphenomenalism that I think results from some of the sources above, can make room for the explanatoriness of psychological properties (and, perhaps more generally, of other special science properties). As it can be suspected, the answer to that question will depend on our views about explanation. Explanatory pragmatism may have an easier time making causal inefficacy and explanatory relevance compatible. My general concern is, however, whether realist approaches to explanation can be compatibilist in this sense. In fact, the scope of this paper is slightly more limited: I try to show that the most compelling indirect and direct arguments going from epiphenomenalism to lack of explanatory relevance are not conclusive. In the opening section I introduce some terminology and briefly explain some of the epiphenomenalist worries. In sections 2 and 3 I consider different versions of an indirect argument: if we want epiphenomenal properties to be explanatory within explanatory realism they have to be real, genuine properties; but this is not possible. In the section 4 I discuss two versions of a direct argument linking epiphenomenalism and causal irrelevance.3